AI designed rocket engines
Tech Planet shares a video of the University of Sheffield’s new AI to design a rocket engine. They used AI to help design it, then 3D printed and fired it up.
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Training an AI model on its own generated output destroys the model
Describing a situation much like the dangers of genetic inbreeding, computer scientists Matyas Bohacek and Hany Farid wrote a paper that describes how AI image generators that start training with their own generated data quickly start deteriorating.
‘Nepotistically Trained Generative-AI Models Collapse‘ shows that training an AI image generator on AI generated images quickly leads to a deterioration in the quality of output which can only be fixed by re-introducing real images.
In Nature, a more recent study found a similar effect in text generation, with the use of synthetic data leading to increasingly nonsensical results.
Artifactory:
AI NPCs in NVIDIA’s ACE Demo at CES 2024
I’ve posted videos of AI powered NPC’s in games before (Replica Studios). NVIDIA’s Kairos ACE demo at CES 2024 was equally as amazing. It allows you to create NPC’s in game that that have their own backstories, agendas, and can interact to anything that a person throws at it.
Even more amazing, you can just talk to it like a regular person and it generates realtime voice acted responses.
Here’s a good demo of someone performing an extended interaction with the characters
This of course has all kinds of people in the game industry getting scared – especially voice actors.
You can see the whole host of tools provided by nVidia ACE. Besides game characters, there is Tokkio which provides interactive healthcare, retail, and IT customer service characters. Streaming ultra-realistic rendering, animation blending and playback, audio2face for facial animation and lip sync, and many others.
This is truly revolutionary technology that is going to massively change the landscape of countless industries. You can watch it as it’s unfolding.
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AI interprets gymnastics
Wow – that’s disturbing. AI has a way to go yet
AI generated presidental debates
Following on a long string of AI generated Twitch channels – TrumpOrBiden2024 created an AI based presidential debate channel on Twitch. These things get more and more interesting. Will we reach a point we can’t tell the difference?
The channel creator is pretty clever by pitting donations/subs against each other to raise money. Looks like he’s got well over $50,000 right now (no word if he’s resetting each week he puts it up – but I wouldn’t be surprised) and it’s pretty neck-and-neck.
People will ask inappropriate things at times, so it’s kind of an 18+ age group since you never know what someone will ask.
Open Source has some big questions ahead
There’s no doubt that open source software makes up the majority of the world’s internet services. However, some recent, and not so recent problems are starting to shine the light on some of the problems facing the open source communities.
- Malicious maintainers and contributors – xz compression backdoor that went for an amazingly long time before it was detected. The backdoor was added by a contributor Jia Tan who had been making contributions for 2 years. The level of obfuscation and sophistication was unprecedented. It was only discovered by a very astute senior Microsoft engineer.
- Hacking of open source maintainers/distro servers – Kernel.org was infected and came to light in 2011, when kernel maintainers revealed that 448 accounts had been compromised after attackers gained root system access to servers connected to the domain. There’s no evidence source was changed, but it just as easily could have.
- Open source burnout – The burnout levels among Rust developers spawned an interesting article (and another) that really speaks to general burnout problems. Honestly, this is just one more example of why ‘passion’ jobs are bad for you and what you really want is a job you work 8-5 and then unplug from completely.
That’s by no means the entire list. Open source is now the backbone of our modern computer infrastructure – and is under attacks from more threats than it has ever faced. From ransomware hacker groups, for-profit botnets, all the way to the increasing occurrences of state-sponsored hackers/infiltrators. The attacks and manipulations can now be combined with AI actors and code to create nearly limitless attack vectors and attackers.
Combine this with unpaid contributors that need to police themselves and this represents some serious threats.
The New Stack has a great article describing the new challenges facing open source development.
AI has become skilled at deceiving people
AI systems have already demonstrated the ability to bluff in a game of Texas hold ’em poker against professional human poker players, to fake attacks during the strategy game Starcraft II in order to defeat opponents, and to misrepresent their preferences in order to gain the upper hand in economic negotiations.
The most striking example of AI deception the researchers uncovered was in their analysis of Meta’s CICERO, an AI system designed to play the game Diplomacy – a world-conquest game that involves building alliances. CICERO placed in the top 10% of human players who had played more than one game; but the methods it used were the most interesting.
Even though Meta claims it trained CICERO to be “largely honest and helpful” and to “never intentionally backstab” its human allies while playing the game, the data the company published along with its Science paper revealed that CICERO used multiple kinds of deception such as premeditated deception, betrayal, and outright falsehood (faking being on the phone with its girlfriend).
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David Attenborough Narrating your life – or your cat’s adventures
Replicate built a GPT-4 powered vision + ElevenLabs python script so you can star in your own Planet Earth episode narrated by David Attenborough. (Code: https://github.com/cbh123/narrator)
AI Raspberry Pi Cat Detection constantly monitors your feline friend and immediately sends you an email the moment it makes mischief. You can also configure the AI narrator to keep you posted on your cat’s activities
Your bedtime story has been replaced by AI
Do your kids like bedtime stories? Stefano Mazzocchi has put Fably, the AI storytelling companion, on a Raspberry PI Zero.
Just push the button, tell it what kind of story you want, and enjoy the results. So much for bedtime stories with the kids.
This project is open source and you can build one for yourself or run it from your laptop. The project is located here: https://stefanom.github.io/fably/
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Fifth Element – 1950’s style
Abandoned Films is back with another trippy, AI-generated movie trailer. This time, they took the 1997 sci-fi classic The Fifth Element and applied a 1950’s big-screen aesthetic.
While definitely not perfect, these AI generated trailers are amazing ways to generate and explore artistic concepts.